BNSF Bakersfield - How To Fix Bad Spawns
The issue for some spawns out BNSF Bakersfield is an RTS issue at calculating the proper location of where a truck should be. I'm writing this article not only for a quick reference for myself, but to possibly show others how to fix it if they want to do so. In some cases Run8 will fix it automatically. Most cases you can get away with copying to the TMU if it doesn't disappear on you when it fails. Those are the easiest way to fix it. But on even more rare occasions the TMU will never work (I'm not sure why the later happen less than the others). But in that case the only way to correct it is to manually fix the train file. The issue is that RTS does not properly calculate when 2 trucks are between a small track section. In order to make most spawns work RTS ignores track section 5199. It does give a value for 5198 and 5200. The test cement cars we used to survey the area has 9.29 meters between truck a and b, while the area between trucks underneath the coupler on the same cement cars is 3.46 Now those numbers are only important for surveying purposes and mean nothing to how to fix the issue. But in order to determine how long a track section is, those numbers must be kept in mind to determine overall track section size. In this example you will see 3 train files. The 1st is the original survey train. The 2nd is another survey train that is staggered about 5 meters from the original. The 3rd on the right is a sample issue. What you need to notice here is on the 1st survey 5199 has no trucks on it at the trucks are on 5198, 5120. This is again why we do 2 surveys overlapping each other. For this particular block that is an issue 5198 has a length of 28.4 (which is shown by taking the value of 9.29 and subtracting it from the difference of the 1st 5199 truck, and 5198 last truck to get that value). 5199 has a length of 4.51 (rounded a bit). Both of these values are what is important to know moving forward to fix any issue train files. You also have to know how much length there is between car types. This can be found by exploring the file and is also in RTS data files for this purpose. Here the issue falls on a couple of Box Cars. Box cars have 11.74 meters between trucks between a and b side, and has 4.9 meters between trucks under the coupler. For the above example it's easy as they are both box cars. However if they were not to get what is between car types you simply take the difference between each car type, divide by 2, then add the 2 together. With that now we can analyze the file, and find the issue and the fix. 32.91 is the value RTS uses which combines 5198 and 5120 into a 5198 block. When you see anything however above 28.4 for 5198 then what that should be is a different value and a 5199 block. 32.0487262 is indeed shown here so subtract it by the limit of the 5198 block (28.4) and you will come up with the correct value that needs to be replaced. Be sure to also change the track section from 5198 to 5199 for that particular truck.